Hobo’s Rock Club & Live Music Venue, Bridgend
Mon 11 October
National Theatre Wales’ latest production, Love Steals Us From Loneliness.
words: Natalie Stone
★★★★

National Theatre Wales returns with its seventh production in association with Sherman Cymru. With the artistic director of NTW himself, John E McGrath, personally directing this specifically commissioned piece by acclaimed Welsh playwright Gary Owen about his hometown of Bridgend, the bar was set high.
The sensitivity of the media ravaged subject matter, as well as Owen’s initial reservations about tackling a subject so close to his heart, only serves to strengthen the script with a genuine, raw edge which makes it one of his most stunning pieces yet. Relatable, sharp and human, the play is at once completely localised as well as completely universal, retaining a fresh poignancy hard to deliver when dealing with age-old themes of love, loss and loneliness.
Starting the play from the karaoke stage of Bridgend’s own gigging standard, dripping with garish Halloween glory and booming club favourites, the audience is immediately yanked back into their teenage shoes of choice. In an excitingly accessible break down of barriers, this play quite literally spills over into the town it is all about.
This effect continues as a drunken, attention-seeking strop, from the self-described ‘sexy witch’ Catrin, leads the audience to the main stage for the first half. The crude, endearing and ‘should be half-remembered’ interchange between two hammered star-crossed lovers, leaves us on a tongue firmly in cheek love confession cliff-hanger. Although the audience expect a messy teenage aftermath, the subsequent death of the third point of the love triangle – Catrin’s boyfriend Lee – throws this muddled moment into a much wider perspective.
In the second half, the characters who are affected by the absent protagonist’s death, reveal through intertwining monologues and dialogue how their whole lives have hinged on that one seemingly trivial outburst of tangled teenage emotion. The majority of empathy is reserved for the grieving mother and the sparky sister.
The gimmicky theme of Halloween which lurks in the background retains a sophisticated symbolism throughout, rendering Lee a physically haunting presence in the play with scattered items from his childhood and adolescence both physically and emotionally entrapping the characters.
Slightly taking from this carefully constructed claustrophobia is the character of Mike, a play-thing for Catrin’s guilt and heavy heart, a strong humourous character, seems out of place in the otherwise tightly connected cast. Rather than sympathising with Catrin and Scott though on the subsequent loneliness in their lives, the true empathy falls with the desperately grieving mother and sparky, no nonsense sister, raising questions over their status as mere secondary characters in the play.
The play does provide a platform for a complex discussion of growing up and how these vivid, real moments come to define us. The feeling of youthful innocence is heightened in the sandwich style structure of the play, ending with a predictable happy ending kiss between the romantic leads. Although expected, this kiss doesn’t take away from the effect of it, as it clearly showcases the ease with which fiction may play with time, yet in ‘reality’ Lee will forever remain seventeen.